


The Mountain of Diamond Remix

by TUNiU



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Emotional Hurt, M/M, Paul has been awake for a long time, Post-Episode: s01e07 Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:42:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27205406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TUNiU/pseuds/TUNiU
Summary: Paul always begins his loops with Hugh: so how did he get rid of Hugh so quickly, and now that the loop is done what happens?
Relationships: Hugh Culber/Paul Stamets
Comments: 4
Kudos: 53





	The Mountain of Diamond Remix

**Author's Note:**

> There is no un-remix. Paul's journey reminded me of the "how long is eternity" tale.

Hugh Culber walked hurriedly at the side of his husband Paul Stamets, as the man strode along utterly enraptured by his new augment implants, to the detriment of anyone he walked into. Though the USS Discovery had several sound proof bulkheads, Hugh felt he could hear the thumping bassline of the party they were missing: Paul because he wasn’t cleared for duty yet, post-surgery, and Hugh, because someone had to keep an eye on Paul. 

His husband had his left sleeve unzipped and was running the fingers of his right hand along the edge of the implant, where it sealed against his forearm. Most of the bio-plastic was merely a protective covering for the small electrode jack grafted onto Paul’s ulnar and radial nerves.

“Stop it,” Hugh told Paul for the countless time. He wanted to keep the surgical site as clean as possible since it was now a permanent literal open wound. Hugh was already planning a daily cleaning regime that he had no doubt Paul would forget about. 

Still Paul stimmed at the implant. He wedged his nails under the casing and wiggled them minutely, testing the attachment; utterly fascinated at the resistant pull against his skin.

Hugh found himself nudging Paul’s elbow to direct him down the corridors. Paul followed. “ _Paul_ ,” Hugh said gently. He balanced the box he held across his forearm so he could place his free hand over his husband’s, to stop the repetitive behavior. “You’re going to hurt yourself,” he added.

Paul looked into his eyes with such vapid adoration, Hugh’s heart broke. Even now, a week after Paul’s trip through the mycelial realm, he was still altered mentally by the psychedelic experience. The various tests both Hugh and Doctor Tracy Pollard had run on a daily basis showed no real sign of a tapering off the effects.

Hugh feared the mind-altering was permanent. 

“You’ll take care of me,” Paul told him, assuredly.

“Always,” Hugh promised. And he would. Even if Paul never recovered his proper mind, Hugh would always be next to him, helping him navigate the world.

They were almost to the turbolift. Then Hugh could put Paul to bed in their quarters, and probably stay up half the night studying Paul’s medical scans. Paul stopped walking. His hands fell to his sides. Hugh was a step ahead of him when he noticed. He turned to face Paul.

“Honey?”

“I love you,” Paul said, bluntly.

“What?”

All the joviality was gone from his face. Paul took the box from Hugh’s hands and placed it on the ground beside their feet. Then he held Hugh’s hands. “I love you, utterly, and without reservation,” he continued, speaking as though by rote. “Tell me you love me.”

Hugh reached up and gently held Paul by the shoulders. “Paul, what’s going on?” he asked.

Paul raised his hands so they were holding Hugh’s forearms. He squeezed them tight for a moment, then ran his hands along Hugh’s arms, up to Hugh’s neck, framing his face. “Please tell me you love me?” he begged. 

Hugh saw the tears forming in Paul’s eyes and he didn’t understand. Was this a new symptom to catalog? Was Paul suffering a sudden chemical imbalance in the brain? As far as he was concerned, their quiet night in bed was cancelled, and as soon as Hugh could he was leading Paul right back to sickbay. “Of course I love you, Paul,” he said. “Where is this coming from?”

Paul pulled gently at his face and he leaned in to meet Paul’s kiss. It was more a silent resting of lips and faces together than anything sensual. Hugh felt Paul’s hands on his neck, then…

* * *

The figures of Stella, her father, and her reluctant husband Harry Mudd, disappeared off the transporter pad in the usual method of disappearing, with accompanying scan lights and sounds. Paul missed the last particles of their existence fading away into the buffer because his attention was on his hands. His fingers, which had been steady just a moment ago manipulating the transport control panel, were now trembling. His heart thumped heavily in his chest. His hands tingled. The room blurred.

“Lt. Stamets?” Michael called to him.

He turned in the swivel chair. “Yes,” he said absently.

“Perhaps it’s time for you to rest,” she suggested.

“No,” Paul stood up, pushing through the exhaustion that had dogged him the last dozen or so time loops. “I have to check the ship. Every time Mudd would exploit the weaknesses in the code for the security system. I have to undo everything he did.” He headed out of the transporter room. The floor wobbled and twisted in his view, but his feet met the bulkheads in a predictable fashion so he tried to dismiss what his sight told him. “I have to get to the servers, we need to roll back the operating system to last week.”

“You mean yesterday?” Ash asked him. He and Michael were almost jogging to keep up with Paul as he headed to the nearest turbolift.

“What?” Paul turned to Ash.

Michael lay her hand on Paul’s shoulder. He stared at it, puzzled. “Have we been looping for an entire week?” she asked gently.

“Maybe, I-I-I lost count,” he answered. There were at least 60 loops before he was even able to get Michael to help. Then there was the time spent teaching Michael how to connect emotionally with Ash to convince him to help. Then there was the time they spent convincing Tilly to help. Then there was the time they spent formulating a plan. 

All in thirty minute chunks, well. Fifteen minutes sometimes, as the other minutes were wasted convincing everyone that yes, he had previously convinced them all in previous loops, and then reciting all the data they had so far.

“Did you get any sleep during that time?”

“Well the ship was exploding every thirty minutes and the loop started with me walking down a hallway with Hugh. Oh god Hugh!” Paul spun around quickly to face the turbolift control and push the call button. 

The room didn’t stop spinning for Paul. He put one hand out to touch the corridor wall but it was too far away. He fell. Michael caught him under the arms and gently lowered him down. As Ash called for a medical team, Michael sat on the floor so Paul’s head rested in her lap. 

“I left Hugh in a storage room,” Paul told her even as his vision pulsed at the edges.

“We’ll find him,” she said. “You need to rest now.”

“No, there’s no time,” Paul rolled himself off Michael’s lap onto his hands and knees. The motion rattled his brain. He looked up at Ash: good. Ash was finally in on the plan for this loop. “The loop’s gonna start again,” he told them. Over the iterations, his mind had become attuned to the passage of the minutes. Right now it was telling him they were out of time.

Michael grabbed him by the shoulders and rolled him back to his original position. “Lieutenant... Paul!”

He looked in her general direction, but couldn’t seem to focus on her face.

“Close your eyes,” she told him.

“The ship is going to explode,” Paul explained weakly.

“Aren’t you tired of seeing it coming?”

He’d learned so much about her in the previous loops. She was so kind. “We can hold hands again,” he offered her, holding up his left hand. “Don’t be afraid, it only hurts for a second.”

“Oh god!” Ash whispered from where he sat next to them.

Paul held his other hand out to Ash as well.

Michael grabbed Paul’s hand. “Thank you, now close your eyes, it’s almost over.”

Paul closed his eyes.

The ship did not explode.

* * *

Hugh opened his eyes. He was laying on a biobed in sickbay. Ash Tyler and Michael Burnham were standing over him watching him wake. He took a moment to catalogue himself, but nothing seemed amiss. He tilted his head up so that he could read upside down his scrolling chart on the screen above the bed. He didn’t even have to decipher the numbers properly to see that all the lines were in green-mode. There was nothing wrong with him. He sat up. There was a slight pain in his neck. It twinged so he turned it to test the muscles.

Paul lay in a biobed beside him, still in his uniform, but with the jacket unzipped.

Since there seemed to be nothing wrong with himself, Hugh immediately stood up and walked the two steps over to Paul’s bedside. " What happened?” he asked the others.

Automatically, he reached out and held Paul’s wrist, feeling for the pulse even as he read the readouts above Paul’s biobed. He ignored the others for the moment as he tried to decipher the readings. Paul’s dopamine, histamine, and melatonin levels were at extremely unhealthy levels.  He turned to them and pointed. “These readings say he’s been sleep deprived for days,” he said. Hugh checked the time in the corner of the screen. It had only been an hour since he last saw Paul.

Michael came to attention and looked Hugh straight in the eyes. “The Discovery has undergone possibly a week’s worth of time loops, each lasting 30 minutes,” she explained to him. “This was caused by a criminal known as Harcourt Fenton Mudd in an attempt to steal the ship and sell it to his Klingon debtors.”

“Time loops?” Hugh repeated. He looked to Ash.

Ash nodded.

“Every thirty minutes Mister Mudd would set the warp core to explode, destroying the ship, killing everyone aboard, and restarting the loop. The only person who retained knowledge of each iteration was Lt. Stamets.”

Hugh froze, staring at Michael. Except he wasn’t seeing Michael. He was seeing Paul burning to death in his mind. Everyone in Starfleet knew what warp core explosions did to ships, utter and complete destruction: no piece left behind bigger than a turbolift. As a doctor, Hugh knew what warp core explosions did to people, depending on how far or close they were to Engineering at the time. People at the center were vaporized instantly. Then the explosion would propagate through the corridors, following the path of least resistance. Those crew at the far end of the ship would have enough time to feel the ship shake, feel the loss of gravity and environmental controls. They would see the wall of fiery destruction headed towards them.

Hugh turned to see Paul asleep in the biobed. His readout showed no sign of any injuries, no burns from the explosion, no asphyxiation from exposure to space. He was just deeply asleep.

“Are we the last ones to wake?” he asked.

“Only Lt. Stamets was affected.”

“But…”

“I surmise he applied a nerve pinch to you at the start of every loop,” she said gently. “In order to get away quickly.”

“But he told you two?” 

Ash looked away from Hugh’s questioning stare.

“Perhaps you never believed him,” she offered as explanation.

Hugh looked back upon Paul. Just this morning he’d been contemplating being Paul’s caretaker as he lived his life insane from exposure to the spore drive. Would he have believed Paul, if he tried to explain about time loops? “No, I guess I didn't,” Hugh admitted.

* * *

Paul woke up when he became aware he was scratching a length of stiff fabric across his hips. He stared for a long moment trying to decipher the visual. There was a single belt, strapping his hips to the bed. He looked around he saw he was in one of the small private rooms in sickbay. Judging by the other unused straps hanging off the bed, he was in a bed designed for violent patients. Why only one strap? His hands were free, save for an IV line in his elbow. He lifted the strap tongue hanging out of the buckle. And he wasn't even locked in place. He pulled the strap out from between the metal.

The doors swished open. Hugh walked in, took one look at Paul and quickly said, “ah, don't move.” He rushed over and gently placed his hands on Paul’s hips.

“Why?” Paul asked warily.

“You’ve been asleep for four days,” Hugh explained smiling. “We had to catheterize you.”

“That didn't wake me up?”

“We did numb you first. But you're not numbed now, so if you move suddenly it's gonna pull.”

“Hence the strap,” Paul surmised.

Hugh nodded. “You were moving a lot in your sleep.”

“I must have been looking for you to hold,” Paul said lovingly.

Hugh said nothing for a long while, then, “let's get you out of here.”

It took several minutes, a spare nurse, a numbing hypospray, and a large curtain to hide the process, before Paul could get up and leave sickbay under his own power. His own power being limited to sitting himself down in a wheelchair so Hugh and a nurse could push him all the way down the ship’s corridors to his quarters. Where Hugh told him he needed to rest.

“I’ve been sleeping four days!” Paul exclaimed.

“Yes, and now you get to eat solid food, and bathe, and sleep some more,” Hugh said cheerfully. “Your vital signs still aren't where they should be even for your mutated self,” he added and retrieved a tray of food from the replicator.

The nurse helped Paul move from the wheelchair to the table chair.

“I can handle it from here,” Hugh told the nurse, who left taking the wheelchair with him. Hugh placed the tray in front of Paul. “Eat,” he commanded and sat down heavily across from him.

Paul picked up his fork. The food was on a silver segmented tray; the pattern sourced from the mess hall replicators. There was rice and chicken with applesauce and jello. All unspiced and small-portioned. A cup with apple juice completed the meal.

Paul looked up at Hugh incredulously. “Are you mad at me?” he asked. He knew that nerve pinching Hugh that last loop was a horrible thing to do. Doing it every loop was a horrible thing, but at least all the other times never actually happened. Once he’d mastered the technique from Michael, and successfully used it on Hugh that first time, Paul had justified it to himself. The first few loops, before he’d learned how to ditch Hugh, he’d been with him, sometimes forcefully kept in sickbay, sometimes in their quarters. But as the ship exploded each time at the end of the loop, he’d seen Hugh comprehend the moment of their deaths so many times.

It was horrifying to see Hugh’s face, not just burning to death, but in the seconds before the flames came: to see the stark devastation in Hugh’s eyes as he knew Paul would die too.  So Paul had justified the nerve pinch as a kindness to let Hugh die in his sleep, nestled in a supply room, away from Harry Mudd’s madness.  But now Hugh was here and it was just assault.

Hugh shook his head from where it was balanced on his joined hands. “I’m not mad at you,” Hugh said. “I’m mad at myself, for forcing you to do it.”

“What, no.”

“How many times did you try to convince me before moving onto Michael?”

“Don’t.”

“How many?”

Don’t lie. Lie. Don't lie. Lie. “Sixty,” Paul said truthfully.

Hugh opened his hands and hid his face in his palms and cried.

“Hey no.” Paul stood up so he could kneel at Hugh’s side. He held onto Hugh’s thighs. “It’s okay now. Hell, I wouldn't have believed me either.”

Hugh glared at him. “I am your husband, I am the one person who is always supposed to believe you.” He rubbed at Paul’s hair, slicking it back, then he rested his hand on Paul’s neck. " You...exploded sixty times because I didn't believe you. Because in the minutes before the loop started I was mentally planning for a life where you stayed insane and I would be your caretaker.”

Paul looked up at him with eyes shiny with tears. “I would never expect you to stop your career to just take care of me forever,” he protested.

“That is really not the point, but let me reiterate:  _ husband _ . It’s my privilege to take care of you, even senile. And the point is, I was planning a life where I would dismiss any nonsensical thing you said as a symptom of craziness. And what were the very next words out of your mouth?”

“That we were stuck in a time loop.”

“And then you died sixty more times than you needed to, and that's on me.”

Paul shook his head roughly. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

“ _ Yeah _ , it is.”

Paul rested his head on Hugh’s thigh. “Do you blame me for nerve pinching you and sticking you in a closet?” he asked, muffled.

Hugh bent over and kissed the top of Paul’s head. “Never,” he said.

“Then I don't blame you for not believing me.”

“That's not how it works.”

“Yes it is, I said so. Now help me up, oh my knees can't take that anymore.”

Hugh helped Paul up to sit in his chair. Paul poked at his food with his fork. He looked up at Hugh who was standing next to him. “There is no way I am eating this alone,” Paul demanded. “Don't pretend you’ve been eating well worrying over me these past four days.” He pointed to the replicator. “Eat, join me in this blah-ness.”

Hugh went to the replicator and came back with a plate of spaghetti with sauce and meatballs and a cup of tea.

Paul stared at him.

Hugh grinned shamelessly. “I’m not the one confined to a bland diet for the next few days,” he explained.

“I hope you stain your jacket,” Paul grumbled.

“Love you too, boo.”

Paul smiled down at his rice and absently rubbed his foot along Hugh’s leg in acknowledgement.  They would be alright now.


End file.
